Celebrity Traitors star survived 'horrors' under doc who 'electrocuted' patients

Daily Mirror

14-05-2025

A British doctor who presided over inhuman experiments to cure patients of 'illnesses' from eating disorders to unsuitable love affairs may also have been involved with the CIA's mind-control experiments says author Jon Stock
Former inmates of a secure psychiatric ward at a central London hospital have revealed the harrowing story of psychiatrist William Sargant's brutally unethical treatments. Author Jon Stock met with a number of Sargant's patients, including award-winning actress and Celebrity Traitors star Celia Imrie.
A disturbing majority of Sargant's patients in the so-called 'Sleep Room' were women and young girls, Jon Stock told the Mirror. More than once Sargant recommended a lobotomy, instead of divorce or separation, for unhappy wives.
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The sick doctor once explained: 'A depressed woman, for instance, may owe her illness to a psychopathic husband who cannot change and will not accept treatment. Separation might be the answer, but... we have seen patients enabled by a [lobotomy] to return to the difficult environment and cope with it in a way which had hitherto been impossible.'
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Sargant's callous disregard for the women under his care extended to parading them, nearly-naked in front of rooms full of medical students.
Celia Imrie was another victim of Sargant. The actress has starred in dozens of British movies from Bridget Jones's Diary to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and is soon to be back on our screens in the BBC's Celebrity Traitors. She told Jon how she developed an eating disorder as a young girl, after being told she was 'too big' to pursue her dream of becoming a ballet dancer.
She explained: 'I worked out every means possible to dispose of food, determined to get 'small' enough to be a dancer, and I was soon little more than a carcass with skin.'
She soon found herself in the hands of Sargant. Celia said: 'The side effects were startling. My hands shook uncontrollably for most of the day, and I'd wake up to find clumps of my hair on the pillow.
'But the worst consequence was that everything I saw was in double vision. When Sargant came into the room, there were two of him. It was horrific and terrifying.
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'Even simple tasks such as picking up a glass of water became impossible. I was injected with insulin every day too. Sargant was a big believer in fattening up his patients to get them well and you soon put on weight with insulin. I think I had what was called 'sub-coma shock treatment'– you weren't given enough insulin to induce a hypoglycaemic coma, but it was enough to make you drowsy, weak, sweaty and hungry.
'I will never know for sure if I was given electric shocks during my stay," Celia added. "Some years back, I tried to find my hospital records, to see the details of my treatment. Unfortunately, Sargant seems to have taken away a lot of his patients' records, including mine, when he retired from the NHS in 1972.
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'Either that, or they were destroyed. I can't remember ECT happening to me, but I can remember it happening to others.'
Sargant's barbaric methods included regular electroshock treatments. 'I vividly recall every sight, sound and smell,' Celia recalled. 'The huge rubber plug jammed between her teeth; the strange almost silent cry, like a sigh of pain, she made as her tormented body shuddered and jerked; the scent of burning hair and flesh. It was a terrible thing for a fourteen-year-old to witness.'
Women were put in Sargant's hands for the flimsiest of reasons. Jon told the Mirror that patient Mary Thornton was admitted to The Sleep Room after her parents suspected that her romance with an 'unsuitable' boy. She told Jon that she also only has patchy memories of her treatment: 'One is of the electrodes being attached to the side of my head. I remember the complete, utter terror because I didn't even know who I was.'
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Jon says this was a common cause of young women's hospitalisation: 'In the mid 1960s, for example, a wealthy businessman contacted Sargant, explaining that his daughter had fallen in love with an 'unsuitable' local man in Europe and wanted to marry him.'
Sargant was employed to help cure the young girl's love-struck 'madness.' He explains: 'A photo later emerged of Sargant, the father and a heavily sedated daughter standing at the door of the aeroplane that had returned her to the UK.'
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One former student at the hospital told Jon: 'Basically, Sargant brought this attractive young woman back at the end of a needle.'
According to some sources, Sargant is also associated with the CIA 's bizarre 'mind control' program MK Ultra. Jon says that there are rumours that the US spy agency helped fund Som of Sargant's work.
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He explains: ' The minutes of St Thomas' Research Advisory Committee meeting reveal that in September 1963, Sargant announced that an anonymous donor would fund the salary of a research registrar (£80,000 a year in today's money) for two years. Sargant refused to reveal the donor's identity.'
He certainly had some involvement with the intelligence community, Jon says: 'Sargant did regular work for MI5 – in 1967, for example, he was called in to assess the mental health of Vladimir Tkachenko, a suspected Russian defector.'
Admitting that Sargant's association with the CIA is one of the hardest parts of the story to prove. Jon says that Eric Gow, a former serviceman who had volunteered to undergo drug trials – under the impression that he was helping cure the common cold – was given massive doses of LSD. He says that he feels sure he recalls seeing Sargant overseeing some of this bizarre experiments at the MOD 's chemical and biological research facility at Porton Down.
The Sleep Room: A Very British Medical Scandal by Jon Stock is published by the Bridge Street Press (£25).